Here at BensBargains we often feel compelled to buy the very deals we post. Some products turn out to be everything we expected, while other products fall short of our expectations. Coming into the new year, I was thinking of how to make this site even more useful, and it occurred to me that we can share our own experiences with these products by doing product reviews. These won't be multi-page write-ups that take 30 minutes to read, but rather a concise statement of how the product performed versus our expectations. Feel free to share your opinions in each review discussion, as well as to contact us about products that you'd like to see us tackle.

I think you have to rely on the honor system to keep people from lying about owning a product. I think it would be a good idea to keep product ratings and comments seperate. People love the comment system so don't lose that.

For the product rating system, I think it would be good to have several dimensions and a 5 point scale for each. Quality, reliability, Price, Vendor, etc. If you don't include Vendor as a rating dimension, then you'll get bad reviews for good products because they're with vendors that people tend not to like (like TigerDirect). It can be reported back as a combined score for easy viewing.

Ben, I think you have a great site and it's great to see that you're not just resting on your laurels. I look forward to see what you come up with.

I'm all for it. I agree that it's gonna be tough to keep them in check. I don't think you want to focus more of your time/efforts into just moderating. True, you could make it a community thing, but I'm not sure that's really all that feasible with the business model you've got going. Just my 2Â¢.

I like the style that fatbacon has. I can tell you the only reason I am still being with this site is that you got a lot of pictures here(Funny enough, but I love to see pictures.)

My suggestion is really really simple. It is important to have your current layout(Pictures, lol). Turn the front page right side (use another way to put categories) into a list of titles of deals sharing by us.

#25 does have a point. having community moderating may not work, and if you concentrate on that instead of finding deals, that could cause problems as well. I think really the best solution is to do what many other free forums do: choose a couple volunteer moderators from people who'd be interested in doing it. People who have been around here a while, don't spam, and have posted many useful comments.

Also, I think that this idea of product reviews could be just one of many new features that you could implement on this site. For example, how about setting up a system whereby people can submit guides to various computer related things?. Like, for example, a guide to which RAM chips are desirable. Or, a guide to CPU overclocking. Or a guide to RAID. Or a guide to determining your computer's power requirements. Or, say, a guide on how to go about building a computer, from selecting parts, to where the best place to buy those parts is, to building it. These guides wouldn't really fit in with the reviews idea, and they wouldn't really work if just posted when people asked for them. For example, I've been asked many times about various computer building advice and instructions. While I'm happy to give it, it would save me, as well as other helpful people, a lot of time and effort, if there were a system of guides covering commonly asked questions.

This may seem ambitious, but consider this: in just the last few months, we've had well over 10,000 people sign up on the forums. While obviously a lot of these people are not active members, there are still a lot of people who actively watch and post on this site. Between all of us, we know a massive amount of information. In order to keep spam out of this guide section, each of the guides could be submitted to ben, who would then post them to a restricted part of the site/forum, provided they were useful. Eventually, bensbargains could become a one stop shop for anything computer related, from a wealth of product reviews, to guides on a multitude of topics relating to computers.

I agree with #23, having separate rankings for different aspects of a deal/product would be very useful.

#28: you know, it's a lot of work to find accurate pictures for all the products posted here. If you see a picture that is wrong, just send ben a link to a more accurate picture, and tell him which deal it applies to.

This may seem ambitious, but consider this: in just the last few months, we've had well over 10,000 people sign up on the forums. While obviously a lot of these people are not active members, there are still a lot of people who actively watch and post on this site. Between all of us, we know a massive amount of information. In order to keep spam out of this guide section, each of the guides could be submitted to ben, who would then post them to a restricted part of the site/forum, provided they were useful. Eventually, bensbargains could become a one stop shop for anything computer related, from a wealth of product reviews, to guides to everything you want to know how to do with computers.

I agree with #23, having separate rankings for different aspects of a deal/product would be very useful.

#28: you know, it's a lot of work to find accurate pictures for all the products posted here. If you see a picture that is wrong, just send ben a link to a more accurate picture, and tell
him which deal it applies to.

"I think that M0f0's opinions about all three items referenced in your comment are just that, opinions, just as your rebuttals are. That's the point. People come (or at least used to come) to this site for deals and depended on the opinions / observations from both sides of the aisle in making their own minds up on wether or not to take advantage of a particular offering. I personally don't know enough about DVD vs. BlueRay (as an example) to have an educated opinion, so tend to rely those users that are more technically inclined to advise me on the benefits / shortfalls of each, NOT the bacon pot pie orientation(s) of other users.

Unfortunately, the M0f0 / bacon / nuisance_sucks / australopithecus phenomenon is not new. I have been on this site long enough (e the pre-"oink" era) to know that this has been ongoing. Only the names have changed.

Here's to hoping that they continue to contribute to the site's success, but contribute in a way that is meaningful to other users outside their merry little band of hooligans.... "

What I said them still holds true. The effectiveness of any useful information on this site is minimized by a minority of users.

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